The 1930s
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a period of retrenchment for the Museum. Funds from the hard-pressed city were sharply reduced, and work on permanent construction in the vast, unfinished interior was suspended for a time upon the exhaustion of old appropriations. However, significant help was forthcoming from the federal government, and with the aid of grants from the Works Progress Administration (chiefly for skilled labor), work on gallery construction and installation was able to proceed. In 1931–32 a branch of the Museum also operated at the 69th Street Community Center, just outside the city limits in Delaware County. This was an innovative, if short-lived, experiment in reaching new audiences—one which other museums in the United States would try in decades to come.
Despite setbacks, the 1930s witnessed many notable achievements, as Kimball continued his efforts to add to the Museum's collections. In 1929, the Museum had seized a unique opportunity to acquire the collection of the French connoisseur Edmond Foulc—including impressive Gothic and Renaissance sculpture, furniture, and the magnificent marble and alabaster choir screen dated 1535–40 from the Chapel of the Chateau at Pagny. With a price tag of one million dollars, the Foulc Collection was the largest single purchase ever undertaken by a museum until that time. Coming as it did just before the stock market crash, and secured by an interest-free bank loan, the Museum's commitment to purchase the collection would probably not have been made in the lean days of the 1930s. Kimball encountered several difficulties in its funding, but by the close of the decade donors were found for most of the objects in the collection.
In 1929 and 1930, a remarkable collection of paintings by the renowned Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins was given to the Museum by his heirs, his wife Susan Macdowell Eakins and their friend Miss Mary A. Williams. Two years later, the Museum acquired the bronze statue Diana, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, which had served as the weathervane atop the old Madison Square Garden tower in New York City for years. This imposing sculpture was installed at the head of the Great Stair Hall, where it still stands. The Museum also received its first important group of photographs in 1932, a group of 48 works by Frederick Evans given by Eastman Kodak, and in 1933 it hosted an international juried exhibition of photography.
Credit for the continued vitality of the Museum through the Depression must also be given to J. Stogdell Stokes, who served as President from 1933 to 1947. Stokes raised the funds necessary to install what are now some of the Museum's most celebrated and distinctive period rooms—the seventeenth-century Dutch room, the Chinese palace hall, and the Indian temple hall. He also helped Kimball pursue major paintings, supporting the acquisition in 1932 of Poussin's Birth of Venus from the collection of the Hermitage, sold by the Soviet state during the Depression, as well as the purchase in 1937 of Cézanne's masterpiece, The Large Bathers. When the social costs of the Depression forced the City of Philadelphia to greatly cut its appropriations to the Museum, Stokes, undaunted, launched the Museum's first major capital campaign. He announced a ten-year $15,500,000 program in 1937 to strengthen the endowment and to finish work on the Museum's galleries, then only one-sixth completed.
